Trouillot Remixed: The Michel-Rolph Trouillot Reader

Throughout his career, the internationally renowned Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot unsettled key concepts in anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, Black studies, Caribbean studies, and beyond. From his early critique of the West to the ongoing challenges he leveled at disciplinary and intellectual boundaries and formations, Trouillot centered the Caribbean as a site both foundational to the development of Western thought and critical to its undoing. Trouillot Remixed offers a representative cross section of his work that includes his most famous writings and lesser-known and harder-to-find texts essential to his oeuvre. Encouraging readers to engage with Trouillot's scholarship in new ways, this collection demonstrates the breadth of his writing, his enduring influence on Caribbean studies, and his relevance to politically engaged scholarship more broadly.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments  ix Prelude: Remembering the Songwriter: The Life and Legacies of Michel-Rolph Trouillot / Yarimar Bonilla  1 Overture: Trouillot Remixed / Yarimar Bonilla, Greg Beckett, and Mayanthi Fernando  14 Part I. Geography of Imagination Interlude 1. Between the Cracks 1. Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness  53 2. The Odd and the Ordinary: Haiti, the Caribbean, and the World  85 3. The Vulgarity of Power  97 4. Good Day, Columbus: Silences, Power, and Public History (1492–1892)  103 Part II. The Otherwise Modern Interlude 2. Ti Dife Boule: Radio Haiti Interview, 1977 / Translated and annotated by Laura Wagner  129 5. The Otherwise Modern: Caribbean Lessons from the Savage Slot  142 6. The Caribbean Region: An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory  160 7. Culture on the Edges: Creolization in the Plantation Context  194 8. The Perspective of the World: Globalization Then and Now  215 Part III. The Fields in Which We Work Interlude 3. Discipline and Perish  235 9. Making Sense: The Fields in Which We Work  239 10. Caribbean Peasantries and World Capitalism: An Approach to Micro-level Studies  276 11. The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization: Close Encounters of a Deceptive Kind  296 12. From Planters' Journals of Academia: The Haitian Revolution as Unthinkable History  319 Part IV. A New Duty Arises Interlude 4. Theorizing a Global Perspective  341 13. Adieu, Culture: A New Duty Arises  347 14. The Presence in the Past  374 15. Abortive Rituals: Historical Apologies in the Global Era  386 16. The Interrupted March to Democracy  406 Liner Notes: A Comprehensive Bibliography of Michel-Rolph Trouillot  421 Index  433 Credits  441

About the Author :
Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1949–2012) was Professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences at the University of Chicago and the author of several books, including Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World and Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Yarimar Bonilla is Professor of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies at Hunter College, and Professor of Anthropology at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Greg Beckett is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Western University. Mayanthi L. Fernando is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Review :
“Trouillot Remixed is an invaluable collection. One is struck again by the clarity of Michel-Rolph Trouillot's arguments about power and the status of the historical; one is called by his precise attention to what is at stake and the skill with which he connected the intimate and the world, or rather, his multiple commitments ‘to both home and the world.’ To begin from Trouillot is to reconstitute all, to reimagine all.” - Christina Sharpe author of (In the Wake: On Blackness and Being) “Michel-Rolph Trouillot produced a distinctive presence in the scholarly worlds of anthropology and Caribbean studies. By the sheer force of his example, he invited us to recognize not only the irreducible complexity of the Caribbean as a horizon of inquiry but also the intellectual duty to take up the challenge of reinventing the categories through which we apprehend and engage this complexity. Trouillot Remixed offers us a thematically distilled selection of his work that will provoke us to appreciate his contribution in fresh and unexpected ways.” - David Scott, Columbia University "A collection of his writing that reveals the importance and potency of his work. . . . This reader includes the scholar’s famous writings as well as lesser-known pieces and offers an opportunity for readers to explore his vital contributions to Caribbean studies and to get a broad view of Trouillot’s theories and observations of the cultures and realm he so acutely studied." - Jordannah Elizabeth (New York Amsterdam News) "This book should permit students to enter into the special world of MRT’s intellectual concerns, his creative and original interrogation of the foundations of anthropology, history, and Caribbean studies, his relentless questioning of the very categories with which we think." (New West Indian Guide)